Tech

Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on the New Digital Age

The growth of the web, the developing world and digital-age career skills were all topics of discussion last Thursday night at a special fireside chat with tech heavyweights Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen at Google's Venice, Calif., headquarters.

The talk felt like an in-person abstract for the duo's new book, The New Digital Age, which was finished after the two traveled to more than 25 countries to forecast the global digital evolution.

"In the next five to ten years, another 5 billion people will join the Internet," said Schmidt, the company's chief executive and one of the world's richest men.

Most of those people will be in places like Asia, Africa and South America. And while newfound access to information will level the playing field to a degree, it will also set the table for the world's villains as much as the up-and-comers, noted Cohen, Google's director of ideas, who spent nearly half a decade at the State Department. This coming influx means we'll keep seeing repressive governments censoring and stifling information and Internet access. And terrorists and hacker groups will continue to battle law enforcement in a fight that seems never ending.

"Everyones' lives will get better [with technology]," said Cohen. But it's "different degrees of assistance."

For most of the planet, struggles over power, water, food, violence and censorship will persist, and technology is not the silver bullet to solve these societal flaws, Cohen continued.

Schmidt agreed, saying that although he grew up with the assumption that technology is the great leveler, that is "in fact not the case."

While the rest of the world struggles to get plugged in, not to mention feed themselves, here we are in the first world arguing about our need for faster fiber optic cables, Schmidt joked.

Still, it's not all bad. Cohen countered with an example of the web's growing power for underserved populations. In Pakistan, he noted, victims of acid attacks are ostracized from society, yet able to live engaging, secondary lives online. In Libya last year, school girls used Google maps to create guides to help them travel and avoid bombings, maps which Cohen says were used by NGOs.

When you hear stories like these, it becomes obvious that innovations for the more privileged, like Google Glass and automated cars are, for the moment, just toys. There are countless underserved regions and peoples still not benefiting from more basic innovations. As the rest of the planet continues to gain Internet access, things will improve, but for all the money Google is investing in the developing world, the company is not powerful enough to be the world's custodian, a point skirted by Schmidt during the audience Q&A when a grey-haired academic asked: Is access to technology actually making us stupider?

"We can't disagree over facts," Schmidt said, reasoning that access to those facts, being reproducible and proven, will help us all.

Facts are essential to a free and informed society, but when every answer is but a touch or click away, the cultural argument is, 'How could it not foster a generation and culture of laziness?' There's a back and forth debate in tech circles whether the Internet makes our lives easier, and the use of search engines like Google are at the heart of the question. So polarizing are views that people can't even agree on the state of innovation. Some say information overload is in fact complicating our lives, while others champion the wealth of knowledge online; though Cohen and Schmidt did not touch on such topics during their talk.

Still, the audience of about 100 seemed genuinely interested and didn't take the two to task for not fully answering the academic's question. The crowd was filled with familiar faces in L.A.'s tech scene, including Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, Nicholas Smoot of the geolocation app Here On Biz, and Hank Leber of the social share service GonnaBe. I sat next to Norman Lear, the writer and creator of the television hits All In the Family and Sanford and Son.

They all listened intently but the sporadic laughter at Schmidt's one-liners hinted at what seemed to be a general sense of a one-way dialogue.

The speakers ended the evening on a bit of career advice, saying that the U.S. desperately needs engineers. So desperate, said Schmidt, that it doesn't even matter if you're even a good one or not. Become an engineer and you will never have trouble finding a job, he said.

They even gave a bit of insight into Google's infamous hiring process: Sometimes they test applicants, said Schmidt, sometimes they threaten to test them and just scare them, and sometimes they test them so much they scare them.

The final question of the night was from a shy 17-year-old who nervously said he was a budding coder at an inner city program called Urban Txt. "I know HTML and Java," the teen declared, asking, how can I maintain my focus and trajectory?

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